Writing a general purpose http get using node and express - node.js

Question

I have the following code:
var getRequest=function(options){
var body='';
var req = http.get(options,function(response){
response.on('data', function(chunk) {
body+=chunk;
}).on('end', function(chunk) {
console.log("body");
return JSON.parse(body);
}).on('error',function(error){
console.log("error: "+error.getMessage());
})
})
return req;
};
What I am trying to do is pass a JSON object of http options,eg:
var options={
host:'localhost',
port:'8080',
method:'GET',
path:'/stuff'
};
and send back a parsed response. However, I can't get this to work and I think its because of the nested function and my misunderstanding of how they work.
Please could someone advise me on how to get the function to return the result of JSON.parse(body) to getRequest?
TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON
thanks.

Answer 1

Easy way to do it is with a body-parser middleware:
Install body-parser with npm (npm install body-parser --save)
Use it like this
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var app = express();
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
//Now you got access to the body object in request.body
app.get('/stuff', function(request, response) {
response.send(request.body);
}
If you want to handle the body packages yourself, here is a sample of working code.
var data = [];
request.on('data', function(chunck) {
data.push(chunck);
}).on('end', function() {
data = Buffer.concat(data).toString();
response.send(JSON.parse(data));
}).on('error', function(error) {
console.log(error);
response.status(400).send(error);
});